Reviews, stories, opinions, ramblings, words… By Aksel Dadswell

Author: Aksel Dadswell

Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus may be a big hot mess, but it has its moments, and I personally enjoyed it on a number of levels despite the overall disappointment.

Not only does Scott’s follow up, Alien: Covenant, have the expectations of the main franchise riding on its distinctly bowed shoulders, it needs to learn its lesson from Prometheus (other than “Don’t fucking hire John Spaihts to write your screenplay”), while providing a decent – and coherent, and scary, and original – continuation of both.

No pressure, then.

I enjoyed this one, mostly. Covenant is a decent addition to the franchise, and it’s a lot neater than Prometheus, which, despite some excellent creature design and great visuals (generally a given for Ridley), featured a shitstorm of dunderhead characters wandering blindly through what was a largely incoherent narrative.

Set ten years after the events of Prometheus, Covenant follows the titular colony ship on its seven-year journey to distance planet Origae-6, loaded up with two thousand colonists and a thousand human embryos in stasis. After a neutrino flare damages the ship, waking up the crew and immolating James Franco’s captain Branson (in the briefest of cameos), they receive a distress call from a lush, potentially habitable planet nobody’s noticed before. Figuring that they might be able to settle here instead of their heavily vetted and scanned and predetermined Origae-6, the crew changes course. Needless to say, the shit is on a collision course with the fan.

Covenant has a great cast, although only a handful of their characters are fleshed out enough for us to care whether they live or die; the rest are simply food for the monsters. Michael Fassbender, both reprising his role as Prometheus’ sociopathic synthetic, David, as well as the Covenant’s newer model, Walter, is the standout here, to absolutely nobody’s surprise. His David is a complex and impressive villain, and far more skincrawling than the bio-horrors picking off the rest of the cast.

As Daniels, Katherine Waterston is the Ripley stand-in and gives a great performance, but her character doesn’t have an enormous amount to do beyond the first act’s character building, and later dispatching of acid-blooded threats.

Billy Crudup’s Oram is one of the more interesting characters, a man of faith forced to take on the role of captain after Branson’s death. His clashes with the rest of the crew and his uncertainties in the face of adversity make him fallible and a little sympathetic. Eventually though, like a lot of the characters in Covenant, his decisions and choices make little sense for his character and fall into the same ballpark as the doofuses who can only run in straight lines, a la Prometheus.

Beyond this, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir and Carmen Ejogo are all good, but their talents are somewhat wasted with underwritten characters or early deaths. The fact that the crew is made up entirely of couples makes for some interesting and fresh dynamics, if only so they’ll be more distraught every time somebody is eviscerated.

Jed Kurzel’s score is effective and thrilling, although it seems to hark back a little too often to Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic work from 1979’s original Alien. It also doesn’t have quite the same epic feel as Marc Streitenfeld and Harry Gregson-Williams’ work on Prometheus. Having said that, it works beautifully here with Kurzel’s trademark moody ambience, and really stands out in some scenes.

For all its problems, Prometheus was at least ambitious in terms of its mythology building, its monsters, and its refusal to recycle the xenomorphs. That Scott has “listened to the fans” and included the traditional xenomorphs in Covenant is actually a bit of a letdown. The xenomorphs’ creation story is interesting and creepy, but the creatures themselves just aren’t that scary anymore. They’re relegated to a few third act set pieces that feel shoehorned into the story for the sake of being able to call this an Alien film. The decision to include the xenomorphs also short-changes the far more unsettling Neomorphs – pale, lanky prototypes that could easily have carried the film if only Scott and the screenwriters had had the faith to let them.

It takes a while for the horror to kick in, and while the film’s attempt to take its time building characters is admirable, this throws off the overall structure, squashing much of its action into the second half. This probably could have been fixed if the film was a little longer, or its third act wasn’t so average, especially after the dark heights of the second act. This section, set largely in some imposing ruins and dominated by some seriously creepy Fassbender on Fassbender interactions, saves the movie. Here it delves into some dark themes and philosophical questions, like the idea of humanity undone by its own drive to evolve and advance. This is aided by screenwriter John Logan’s proclivity for quoting classic works of literature and poetry (no surprises from the man who brought us the pulp horror series, Penny Dreadful). It’s also the closest Covenant comes to being genuinely scary, with some wonderful set pieces and scenes of smaller-scale violence, plus a flashback that’s both beautiful and terrifying.

Unfortunately, all this good work dissolves into predictable mediocrity as the characters return to the ship for the final act, featuring lazy off-screen deaths and what is by now a severely flogged dead horse for the franchise: ejecting the monster into space. There’s also a “twist” that’s ruined by being painfully, stupidly obvious from the moment it’s hinted at earlier in the film. On the other hand, it makes for a great ending, and leaves me hopeful for Scott’s planned third prequel film.

Ultimately Alien: Covenant could have been a lot better, could have delivered on its promise of a dark sci-fi horror epic that terrifies as much for its existentialism as for its monsters. What we got was far from shit, and at the very least it’s one of the best looking films of the year, but Covenant can’t seem to decide which side of the Prometheus/Alien fence it wants to sit on, resulting in a clumsy hybrid that ends up playing it far too safe. There are some great moments in there, and I honestly enjoyed it much more than it seems; it just needs more polish and coherence.

Scott’s apparently planning to conclude this prequel trilogy in the next few years. Third time lucky, fingers crossed?

When I first saw the incredible trailer and luscious promotional artwork for Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski’s 80’s horror throwback The Void, my expectations were set dangerously high. And why shouldn’t they have been? Not only did it look fantastic, but the past few years have been inundated with some astonishing and original horror films – The Witch, The Babadook, It Follows, The Invitation, Get Out, Bone Tomahawk – and this trend doesn’t look like it’s going to dry up anytime soon. Sure, there are some stinkers out there too, but there was no reason to believe that The Void might fall in with that crowd.

I won’t go into any detail about the plot, since there really isn’t that much of one anyway, beyond the basic scenario of a group of characters trapped in a hospital, assailed from outside by white-robed cultists and from inside by gelatinous horrors and a madman with a propensity for self-mutilation.

The Void isn’t exactly a bad film, but for me the disappointment started to soak through as its 90-minute run time dragged on. Its most glaring problem is that it just isn’t very original. With its aesthetic and its – admittedly quite good – practical creature effects, it wears its influences on its sleeve. The problem with this is that I was regularly reminded of all the far superior horror films it’s clearly been inspired by: John Carpenter’s The Thing and Prince of Darkness, Event Horizon, The Beyond.

The thing with homage-style films is that they can be great fun even if they don’t end up subverting the thing they’re emulating. Take Adam Wingard’s 2014 film The Guest, a brilliant 80’s style retro action thriller/slasher. It works so well not simply because it has a great script and is well made, but because it’s fun. Unfortunately, fun isn’t a word I’d use to describe The Void.

It has all the components of a potentially mind-blowing horror film – murderous cults, gelatinous creatures, body horror, monstrous pregnancies, alternate dimensions – but it never really does anything interesting with them, and it never seems to work on its own merits. Everything here feels too subdued, like it’s too afraid to be its own film. It’s not as weird as it could be, not as violent, not as moving or atmospheric or even cosmic. Again, the practical effects are admirable, but the creature design is dull, the scene set-up pedestrian, and the constantly flickering lights infuriating. None of the elements seemed to come together for me, or not enough to make a coherent, flowing story. The script is severely lacking in both direction and three-dimensional characters, and the acting is wooden at best. The human villain is a one-note nutjob with a flimsy, bordering-on-ludicrous motivation that only gels with his actions on the most superficial “let’s-try-this-because-it’s-gross” level. Even the score is barely noticeable, and that was the one area they at least could have let rip with the Carpenter worship.

I think the problem here is that the directors seem like they’re trying to build a mythology for their film, with the triangle motifs and the multidimensional elements – the hallucinatory shots of desolate landscapes, galaxies and pulsing flesh are beautiful, and by far the best part of The Void – but they end up cramming in a whole bunch of things that don’t necessarily work in and of themselves. Internal logic is nowhere to be found. There’s no rhythm or harmony to the story or its characters, which are forced to co-exist in a world that has a lot of potential, but ultimately isn’t very believable or engaging.

It’s possible I’m being too harsh on this because I was so excited to see it, and by the look of a lot of reviews it’s been receiving, I expect most people to disagree with me, but with the horror genre experiencing a renaissance of gripping, original work that isn’t just limited to film, this kind of messy pastiche of beloved influences just isn’t good enough.

By the end of The Void, it became disappointingly apparent that this is one of those cases where the promotional material ends up being far better than the film itself.

For all his influence on weird fiction, his insinuation into pop culture and his insemination of so much fictional homage (of varying degrees of quality), it’s fairly well known by now that HP Lovecraft was also a racist piece of shit, an unfortunate quality that also shines through in much of his fiction. This is apparent not just in his portrayal of squirming, unspeakable monsters, but pretty much any description of non-Aryan characters, although ‘characters’ might be overstating it. Rancorous descriptions abound of the “hatefully negroid”, “unclassified slant-eyed folk”, and the “blackest and most vicious criminals”, and all this in just one story.

Here’s the thing though: most people remotely familiar with old HP’s work have digested these vile attributes as part of his problematic legacy, either disavowing him entirely or at least acknowledging the inherent problems with the man and his work; the only arseholes who don’t accept it are probably the same kind of people who are still saying, “Yeah, but her emails…”

Personally, Lovecraft will always be one of my major early influences, but both as a writer and a reader it’s essential to evolve, not only in general, but particularly in cases like this, lest one be caught up in Cthulhu’s white supremacist tentacles for untold aeons. That’s not to say that you can’t – or that I don’t – still enjoy a bit of Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath goodness, because you can – and I do – but ignoring or excusing Lovecraft’s attitudes as a natural product of its time is not only lazy, but implicitly racist in its own way too. Recognising and calling out someone’s bigotry, no matter how long dead he is, doesn’t entirely negate an appreciation of the guy’s work or deny the scope of his influence on an entire genre, but it does acknowledge the issue with blindly idolising a writer whose racism wasn’t the only problem with his fiction.

Either way, contemporary weird literature has an obligation to move past and subvert the distasteful elements of Lovecraft’s fiction, at the very least. That there’s still so much Lovecraft-inspired fiction being produced really gives writers the opportunity to actively address HP’s bigotry, to tackle it head-on and present a Mythos story from the point of view of one of those minorities previously relegated to a “babel of sound and filth”. Which is exactly what Victor LaValle has done with The Ballad of Black Tom, essentially a remake of one of Lovecraft’s more racially inflamed stories, “The Horror at Red Hook”.

The original story deals with the occult underbelly of, you guessed it, Red Hook in Brooklyn, and the involvement of the “queer, corpulent” recluse Robert Suydam in kidnappings, illegal immigration and clandestine rituals. It’s not exactly HP’s strongest work, and is dragged down to the point of ruin by its flagrant racism and stereotyping, but there are a few great moments in “Red Hook”, particularly the lurid, teeming descriptions of “night crypts [and] titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness.” Really though, this is limited to a handful of fleeting scenes; even discounting the racism, the story is messy and more than a little dull.

For The Ballad of Black Tom, LaValle seems to take the parts he likes, omitting entirely the weird tangential wedding from HP’s original. His version of the story focuses on black Harlem resident and not-very-good musician, Charles Thomas Tester as he gets caught up in the occult. Although it’s not necessary to have read Lovecraft’s story prior to this, LaValle interweaves characters and elements from the original to the extent that some knowledge of “The Horror at Red Hook” would benefit the reader, if only to be able to say “Oh, that’s cool, I see what he did there.”

The importance of LaValle’s novella cannot be understated, not just in terms of its response to the problematic ways of Lovecraft and his fiction, but especially in today’s climate of inclement ignorance and racial hatred. This is a great book in that it’s not simply playful or original in its subversion of Lovecraft’s fiction and philosophy, but that it digs deep. There are layers here waiting to be unpeeled, not the least of which is an excellent, subtle commentary on Lovecraft’s cosmic indifferentist philosophy. Tester notes at one point that a “fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naïve”, which is a great way of examining the implications of the author’s supposed indifference relative to his racist views. This also brings to light Lovecraft’s often deliberately flimsy characterisation; with Tester, we get not only an interesting and unique character, but through him and the context of his race and circumstances, an empathetic one. The dynamic LaValle creates in rewriting a Lovecraftian story with a black character gives the mythos a fresh coat of paint with his different perspective and experience of the world, but it’s also infinitely more engaging in that we’re following a real, three-dimensional person rather than a character designed to simply convey the plot. Gone is the passive observer. Tester’s treatment – and subsequently the treatment of black people in general at that particular time and place – moves the reader far more than the realisation of humanity’s insignificance, a realisation that by this point isn’t all that groundbreaking. After all, “what was indifference compared to malice?”

Everything I’m saying here probably makes it sound a lot heavier than it actually is. Black Tom does tackle some serious issues, but LaValle is never heavy-handed in his execution. That he’s managed to wrap his poignant and subversive commentary on Lovecraft’s racism in a work of fiction that’s thrilling and electric and just plain fun is an enormous feat.

Where Black Tom falls flat for me, however, is in its inclusion of Lovecraft’s titular Mythos deity, Cthulhu. The original story had no overt connection to the tentacled beastie, nor any other of his squirming brethren, although its use of cults and monsters and eldritch dimensions still places it firmly within that universe. What I liked about “Red Hook” was the ambiguity and relative freshness of some of its horrors, particularly the “naked phosphorescent thing” that emerges from an otherworldly lake towards story’s end. Unfortunately this is one of the elements that LaValle decided to cut, replacing it with the more recognisable Cthulhu, which in some ways seems like a bit of a safer route, and ultimately a less engaging one.

About halfway through, the narrative switches from looking over Tester’s shoulder, to the detective Malone’s, Lovecraft’s equivalent of a mostly useless protagonist in the original. Although this tactic adds to the suspense and mystery regarding Tester’s actions and motivations, it definitely feels like the weaker section of the narrative after the tour de force of Tester’s opening. LaValle does explore the matter-of-fact racism expressed by Malone and company, but aside from his sensitivity to the supernatural, Malone is cardboard compared to Tester.

These flaws aren’t deal-breakers though, and in the end The Ballad of Black Tom is an engaging, original work that does the genre a service in its subversion of the traditional Lovecraftian narrative. It marks an important milestone in Lovecraft’s contentious legacy, and it’s a bloody great read, too.

I wanted to like this book so much. I really tried, if only out of service to my admiration for Cronenberg’s incredible back-catalogue of films. I’m a big fan of the guy’s work and so it seemed a given that I’d equally enjoy his debut novel, but it was not to be. It’s not that Consumed is an unmitigated piece of shit – there are some great ideas in there, some nice Cronenbergian body horror, and some hilarious, subversive moments. It’s just that these things, for me, felt buried beneath the endless philosophical ramblings and itemised breakdowns of technology that seemed to make up most of the book. I almost stopped reading this so many times. I know the emotional disconnect of the characters here is probably part of the point, that I’m supposed to feel like I’m observing the narrative on a laptop screen or through a camera lens, but the whole experience left me floating in a void of frustration and indifference. Having finished the novel, I feel like maybe I missed the point, that my reaction to it is wrong somehow, that maybe the story doesn’t really flounder in its own self-aggrandising philosophical wank, but who knows? I guess I’m torn because of the potential the book had for me. For every dull, esoteric moment there are glimmers of intrigue and horror, but being caught in this good/bad see-saw isn’t exactly what I’d call a good time. Even the book’s final scene feels both absurdly abrupt and actually quite clever. In the end, though, I was left dissatisfied and underwhelmed for a book with so many supposedly shocking and weird moments.

A quiet, creeping kind of horror that’s soaking in Wehunt’s trademark human melancholy, The Tired Sounds, A Wake is a beautiful, dreamlike novella that left me feeling simultaneously disjointed, broken, and uplifted. Wehunt is a magnificent purveyor of weird fiction, but those elements of his work always ebb and flow around the shape of the human; with his slow and poetic prose, he captures the agonising minutiae of his characters’ thoughts and actions, their motivations, their fallibility on raw, vibrant display. Although personally I preferred the stories in his recent debut collection, Greener Pastures, this is a wonderful, quietly creepy and immensely beautiful novella. Another great publication from the consistently brilliant Dim Shores, and featuring breathtaking cover and interior art from Justine Jones.

This chunky novel is a busy fever dream of black comedy and violent, clever sci-fi that balances its batshit crazy moments with a surprisingly tender, human heart. There is so much going on here; the world Suddain creates feels well established and worn-in, crafted as much from what he does say, as what he doesn’t. He has a way of disguising exposition with clever scenes and devices, and in fact his skills at narrative subterfuge overall are a big part of what makes Hunters and Collectors one of the most intelligent and enormously fun books I’ve read in years.

Part of me wondered whether I should post anything about the latest Laird Barron because for a moment I thought, what else is there really left to say about the guy that hasn’t already been said, that I haven’t already said, that we don’t already know? He’s a visceral, commanding, awe-inspiring writer who just keeps pushing the boundaries of genre writing. So far, so Barron. Anyone familiar with his name or work knows this already.

But I wrote this review anyway, and I’m posting it, and, sure, it might fall into that pattern I seem to have established where I read a book I love and then extol its virtues in a thousand-odd-word post – which, in my more self-loathing moments, feels like it probably comes across as just an exercise in how many adoring adjectives I can fit into a sentence. But it’s not that at all. Those adoring adjectives aren’t an exercise in anything except how I honestly feel about the noun I’m attaching them to.

Also, fuck all that doubt. If you like something, if you love something, if it fills you with joy or wonder or awe or terror or adrenaline, and if it makes you feel like there are still new things to be discovered in the world and new ways and angles to look at it, then you need to shout about that and share it with as many people who will listen. Plus, if this review compels just one person to pick up Barron’s – and any of his vast number of brilliant contemporaries’ – work for the first time, then all that seemingly redundant gushing is worth it.

But enough about that. Adoring adjectives await…

If you thought you knew what to expect from Laird Barron, his latest (fourth) collection – and sixth major publication – Swift to Chase, tears down all those preconceptions. He breaks a lot of new ground here, especially in terms of technique, structure and style. His Old Leech Mythos – which makes Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos look like the Teletubbies – is present and accounted for, but Barron attacks it from some unexpected angles. He seems to be going out on an experimental limb both with the individual stories as well as the larger picture that’s pieced together as you move through the collection.

The opening story, “Screaming Elk, MT”, introduces recurring badass Jessica Mace, and there’s nary a mention of Old Leech and Co., though it’s not exactly devoid of mortal harm, scheming sleazebags and otherworldly terror. It’s a great, compact piece of writing that cuts to the bone, and to the chase.

If I have a complaint about this story, it’s that this is (spoiler alert) one of the few Barron tales where the protagonist escapes largely unharmed, and the monster seems to be vanquished a little too easily, let alone at all. More often than not, Barron’s antagonists are as insurmountable and eternal as the universe from which they spring, and there isn’t a sliver of hope to be glimpsed for the human characters, alive or not. Jessica Mace, on the other hand, seems to unpick that weave, and although she’s not without her share of suffering and madness, there’s still something of her left to keep going.

In a lot of ways, Screaming Elk sets the tone for the rest of the collection inasmuch as it’s a character-driven piece with great pacing and a fast, canny narration. Regarding the latter, Barron doesn’t waste his words, but his prose is far from frugal. It’s lean, dangerous, whip-smart and prison-hard.

Barron’s use of language has always been one of his best assets, but here there’s a sense of . . . snazziness and wit, which I won’t say was absent from his previous work, but has certainly evolved into something more complex in Swift to Chase. His antagonists, particularly the prolific Children of Old Leech, have always possessed a certain black wit, a predatory playfulness that seems inherent to their immortal, hedonistic race. His human characters aren’t exactly dead-eyed chumps either, but the black humour is on much more prominent display in this collection than I’ve noticed in Barron’s work before.

I laughed out loud more than once at the acerbic one-liners scattered throughout these stories, their deadpan delivery an organic part of the narration rather than an overt joke or attempt at humour. Which I guess is another of Barron’s strengths; marbling his stories with so many elements that work with a beautiful synchronicity but never overpower the narrative’s momentum.

For me, the part of any Laird Barron story that sticks in the mind is usually the scare, the moment of alien horror, the big monster scene and the skin-crawl that leads to it. But what stayed with me here was the people and their electric interactions. The horror elements are as chilling as always, but the most memorable parts of Swift to Chase are its moments of human nuance, of bonding or treachery or tension. Dialogue and body language fizz off each other with an amazing energy few writers can equal.

This definitely isn’t to say that there are no moments of sheer awesome weirdness on display here, though. There’s a glorious B-movie ambience to “the worms crawl in,”, a story whose several twists and turns aren’t even the coolest things about it. A reimagining of the mythic Wild Hunt that knocks that last Witcher game’s version on its arse, “Frontier Death Song” is just begging (in my head, anyway) for a blood-soaked film adaptation. “Ardor” goes more traditional Barron, with a noir-flavoured story about the hunt for an obscure old movie star and a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, although its nonlinear structure throws both protagonist and reader around a timeline that never does any favours for the former. “Ears Prick Up” is perhaps the wildest of all, a straight-up pulp sci-fi adventure eloquently narrated by, as the blurb has it, “an atomic-powered cyborg war dog” cutting down enemies with his master in a dark, Warhammer 40,000-esque future.

But what really sets Swift to Chase apart from Barron’s previous work is its structure, the way he experiments with form and style and interconnected narratives on a level we haven’t seen from him before. A shared universe and intersecting characters have certainly been present in Barron’s previous three collections and two novels (and that lightbulb moment when you discover some reference or connective tissue is magical), but aside from the overarching mythos, these have been smaller nods or clues for the more canny reader to pick up on. In Swift to Chase, the connections are impossible to miss – in fact, some stories seem to rely quite heavily on the context built up by earlier works in the collection. Dead characters reappear, minor players take on larger roles, and genealogies are filled in as the book progresses. It’s a masterful structure, and must have required one hell of a flowchart to keep track of. I wonder if Barron plans out this web of complexity or if it just comes together as he writes. Either way, wow.

For a collection that fits together so well, there’s a nice variety of stories on offer here; even those that revolve around certain incidents and characters play around with structure and point of view enough to have a unique flavour.

Every story here, bar the last, was originally published elsewhere, in anthologies or literary magazines. Given that so many of the stories here go hand in hand, mostly revolving in some way around a handful of bloody events and characters, it seems to me much more beneficial to have them all together in the one collection, providing that larger context and filling in the dark puzzle of their circumstances in a way that individual publication just couldn’t achieve. So tightly knit are they that some of this book comes pretty close to looking like a mosaic novel.

Sure, a lot of pieces work well on their lonesome, but these – especially stories like “Ears Prick Up”, “Frontier Death Song”, “Ardor”, “the worms crawl in,”, and “Black Dog” – are either vaguely linked to the collection’s major arc, or are present by way of their Alaskan heritage, a setting which is one of the uniting factors for the collection as a whole.

Personally, nothing’s ever going to beat the sheer terror and awe of my favourite of Barron’s previous collections, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, but that’s not a slight against Swift to Chase by any means. This is a bold and exciting family of work that subverted all my expectations and surprised me at every turn. Barron’s narrative choices are always interesting, and the tricks he pulls off here are clever enough to be innovative, but never feel like empty illusions engineered for nothing but their shock value. Honestly, I’m such a fan of this guy’s work that when he releases a new book, everything else on my to-read list has to wait it out as I devour his scrumptious prose, and then find myself hungry and pining for more once it’s over. That said, my love for all things Barron isn’t a blind love, but one built on the talent and hard work that shines through in his writing, and, at risk of sounding like a cheap salesman on a late night TV commercial, it’s a love you too can nurture and enjoy for five easy monthly payments of sanity, and maybe your soul, and—

Okay, I’ll stop. Just go read Swift to Chase. Or anything else by Barron. Please. Do it. I’ll love you if you do, but I’ll know if you don’t.